Note Radar

The term Balkan Wars refers to the two wars that took place in South-eastern Europe in 1912 and 1913. The First Balkan War broke out on 8 October 1912 when Bulgaria, Greece, Montenegro and Serbia (see Balkan League), having large parts of their ethnic populations under Ottoman sovereignty, attacked the Ottoman Empire, terminating its five-century rule in the Balkans in a seven-month campaign resulting in the Treaty of London. The Second Balkan War broke out on 16 June 1913 when Bulgaria, dissatisfied with its gains, attacked its former allies, Serbia and Greece. Their armies repulsed the Bulgarian offensive and counter-attacked penetrating into Bulgaria, while Romania and the Ottomans used the favourable time to intervene against Bulgaria to win territorial gains. In the resulting Treaty of Bucharest, Bulgaria lost most of the territories gained in the First Balkan War. Background The background to the wars lies in the incomplete emergence of nation-states on the European territory of ...

Few issues in modern history have received as much attention as assigning responsibility for the outbreak of the World War in 1914. The debate began during the war itself as each side tried to lay blame on the other, became part of the "war guilt" question after 1918, went through a phase of revisionism in the 1920s, and was revived in the 1960s thanks to the work of Fritz Fischer. This lecture also deals with the causes of World War I, but does so from a Balkan perspective. Certainly Great Power tensions were widespread in 1914, and those tensions caused the rapid spread of the war after it broke out, but many previous Great Power crises had been resolved without war. Why did this particular episode, a Balkan crisis that began with a political murder in Bosnia, prove so unmanageable and dangerous? Some questions will help to frame our inquiry: * What was the purpose of the assassination of Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914? * Who was responsible for the killing,...

The Second Balkan War was a conflict which broke out when Bulgaria, dissatisfied with its share of the spoils of the First Balkan War, attacked its former allies, Serbia and Greece, on 16 June 1913. Serbian and Greek armies repulsed the Bulgarian offensive and counter-attacked, penetrating into Bulgaria. Having previously engaged in territorial disputes with Romania, the new war caused a Romanian intervention against Bulgaria. The Ottoman Empire also took advantage of the situation to regain some lost territories from the previous war. When Romanian troops approached the capital Sofia, Bulgaria asked for an armistice, resulting in the Treaty of Bucharest, in which Bulgaria had to give up much of its First Balkan War gains to Serbia, Greece, Romania and the Ottomans. The war caused a permanent break up of the Russo-Bulgarian alliance, and thus left Serbia as the only ally of Russia in this critical region. For this reason Serbia had Russia's full support. This allowed Serbia to igni...

The First Balkan War, which lasted from October 1912 to May 1913, pitted the Balkan League (Serbia, Greece, Montenegro and Bulgaria) against the Ottoman Empire. The combined armies of the Balkan states overcame the numerically inferior and strategically disadvantaged Ottoman armies, and achieved rapid success. As a result of the war, almost all remaining European territories of the Ottoman Empire were captured and partitioned among the allies. Ensuing events also led to the creation of an independent Albanian state. Despite its success, Bulgaria was dissatisfied with the peace settlement and with the Ottoman threat gone, soon started a Second Balkan War against its former allies. Background Tensions among the Balkan states over their rival aspirations to the provinces of Ottoman-controlled Roumelia, namely Eastern Roumelia, Thrace and Macedonia, subsided somewhat following intervention by the Great Powers in the mid-19th century, aimed at securing both more complete protection for the ...